Leaders in Beijing Feared Arab Spring Could Infect China

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan -
May 1, 2012

Shortly after a Tunisian fruit vendor
set himself on fire in 2010, some senior Chinese leaders began
asking if the rebellions that followed throughout the Arab world
could ignite similar uprisings in China, according to U.S.
diplomatic and intelligence reports.

Some members of China’s ruling Politburo, the reports
reveal, began musing about whether bribery and other abuses of
power were undermining the Communist Party’s authority at least
16 months before the corruption scandal surrounding deposed
party leader Bo Xilai shined an international spotlight on the
issue. The reports were described by five U.S. officials
familiar with the contents who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the intelligence is classified.

As the Arab Spring revolts spread from Tunisia to Egypt and
Libya after vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation on Dec. 17,
2010, the reports said, some Politburo members questioned
whether protests might follow against Chinese provincial
politicians demanding bribes; local party officials confiscating
land; and products and government services rendered shoddy by
influence peddling, the U.S. officials said.

Now, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury
Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who will arrive in Beijing this
week to discuss such matters as North Korea and China’s currency,
will find the country’s leaders preoccupied by the corruption
scandal, a fugitive human rights activist, a leadership
transition and slowing economic growth.

Insecure Leaders

“The leadership is quite insecure now,” said Michael Green, an associate professor of international affairs at
Georgetown University and a former senior director for Asia at
the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

The fifth generation of leaders since Mao Zedong led
China’s 1949 revolution will be appointed to take the helm of
the Communist Party later this year. That historic shift already
has been clouded by the Bo scandal and the case of activist Chen
Guangcheng, who human rights advocates say is under U.S.
protection in Beijing.

Both cases touch a sensitive nerve in China: the concern
that foreign pressure could rouse some Chinese people against
their leaders and upset the country’s stability, as they have at
other times in the nation’s history.

The Chinese are watching a “soap opera” of murder and
corruption surrounding Bo and his family, and they’re asking,
“How could the system let someone like that emerge?” said
Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings
Institution and a scholar of China’s leadership. “As people
find corruption is out of control, the very legitimacy of
China’s Communist Party is in jeopardy.”

Personal Gain

The state-run Xinhua News Agency said on April 14, four
days after reporting that Bo had been suspended from the
Politburo, “The spouses and children of some cadres have taken
advantage of their power to seek personal gains, disregarding
the law, thus stirring public outcry.”

Three days later, Xinhua said the Communist Party is
“being confronted with the danger of a slackened spirit,
incompetence, divorced relations from the people, inactivity and
corruption.”

The U.S. officials said the Chinese leaders’ concern about
popular protests prompted by the Arab Spring and now the Bo
incident have been compounded by the knowledge that China’s
“Great Firewall” on the Internet no longer can block reports
of the Middle Eastern uprisings and domestic political scandals
on social media, blogs, websites, and from Chinese students and
business people in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Beijing Protest

The leadership’s concern wasn’t unfounded, as protesters
gathered weeks after the Tunisian incident outside a McDonald’s
restaurant in Beijing. While a government crackdown quickly
ended the Feb. 20, 2011 rally, the “Jasmine Revolution”
remained on social media, using computers and mobile phones
mostly made in China, said one of the U.S. officials.

Kenneth Lieberthal, another scholar at Brookings, and other
former and current U.S. officials who travel regularly to China
said they’ve never seen so much open discussion of a political
scandal in Chinese social media and among people they meet.

There’s been much to talk about. The wealth of just three
relatives of Chongqing party chief Bo and wife, Gu Kailai, is at
least $136 million, according to regulatory and corporate
filings tracked by Bloomberg and reported on April 23. Bloomberg
has also reported that the richest 70 members of the National
People’s Congress have amassed assets of some $90 billion in a
nation where the World Bank calculates that the average income
last year was $4,428.

Bo Violations

Bo, 62, has been accused of serious violations of party
discipline, and Gu is under arrest on suspicion of involvement
in murdering a British businessman after an alleged scheme to
launder and transfer funds overseas.

The unfolding account of murder and double-crossing is a
drama worthy of Shakespeare, said Douglas Paal, who worked on
China policy at the White House, the State Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency under several administrations.
“Imagine a centipede with 100 shoes and only three have
dropped.”

The U.S. officials said they’re watching to see if the
Chinese leadership responds to the Bo scandal by continuing to
paint his as an isolated case, beginning a more aggressive
crackdown on official corruption in the provinces, or urging
party leaders at every level to curb bribe-taking and public
extravagance by themselves and their offspring.

‘Bad Apple’

China’s leadership doesn’t want the investigation to go too
far and will present Bo as “one bad apple, and we found him
out,” Lieberthal, who served as a special assistant to
President Bill Clinton on China, said in an interview. “They’re
trying to make this out as a good news story, to persuade people
that at the highest national level, officials are honest. The
question is: Will people buy it?”

James Sasser, a former Democratic senator from Tennessee
and U.S. ambassador to Beijing, described Bo in an interview as
“an outlier, almost a deviant from the stereotype” of a
circumspect Chinese communist leader.

Sasser said he met Bo several times when Bo was mayor of
Dalian and minister of commerce, and recalled him as “a sharp
dresser, very flamboyant in his personality, very handsome,
aggressive and antagonistic.” Sasser said when then-President
Jiang Zemin visited Dalian, he supposedly commented that the
town square Bo had built was larger than Tiananmen in Beijing.

Publicity Campaign

“Bo Xilai was playing games that are not normal in China:
promoting his brand name, his own legitimacy, running his own
public-relations campaign, right up to the end when he gave his
own press briefing at the National People’s Conference” in
March, giving himself a spotlight at the annual event, said Paal,
now vice president of studies at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington.

Paal said Chinese official media, which already have
received directives to denounce Bo and Gu, may pile on by
revealing “mi-shi,” or secret histories of Bo’s family and
associates, so that he can’t be rehabilitated.

“They’re going to limit this as much as possible --
identify the main tumor, excise it and move on,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the
Asia Society in New York. “They’re not going to go into a mass
purge if they can avoid it, because everyone at the top
leadership has a complex web of connections.”

Web of Influence

Bo wasn’t unique with his links between political power and
family wealth, said China analysts and U.S. officials. A full
investigation would mean exposing his close ties to the military,
state-owned enterprises and banks, and provincial officials that
helped him land $159 billion in financing for projects in
Chongqing, China’s largest municipality with 29 million
residents.

Nor were Bo’s family connections unique. He’s the son of a
founder of Communist China; Gu is a daughter of a well-known
Chinese revolutionary general. Both were members of the elite
cadre of “princelings,” privileged offspring of high-ranking
party leaders who hold senior positions in China’s intertwined
government and businesses.

Vice President Xi Jinping, the man expected to be tapped as
China’s next president during the 18th Party Congress later this
year, is also the son of a revolutionary hero, though he keeps a
lower profile than Bo did.

Clean-Up Man

Xi’s daughter studies at Harvard University under an
assumed name, and a joke in China is that his singer wife Peng Liyuan is more famous than Xi is. Xi is known for cleaning up
corruption in Fujian Province, and he was named Shanghai party
chief after his predecessor was brought down for graft. No
evidence has emerged of corruption connected to Xi.

Still, even if Xi, President Hu Jintao, and other members
of the Politburo Standing Committee have rooted out Bo’s alleged
abuses, “every tongue in China is wagging about this,” and
citizens are disappointed that their leaders would allow a man
whose power and ambition were no secret to rise, Paal said.

The Bo scandal has brought public cynicism to a new high,
said Andrew Nathan, a China scholar at Columbia University in
New York. “That doesn’t mean the public in China is going to
rise up in rebellion, but it’s definitely a big hole to climb
out of.”